Editor's Pick

IT ALL began as a speculative idea from a bunch of undergraduates: can you create solid, three-dimensional objects using nothing but the power of sound? It seems crazy, but the students at the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown that their idea isn’t just pie in the sky—although they’ve had to go on a zero-gravity […]

“A DISEASE can go through the whole field within 48 hours,” says Kevin Littleboy, who farms mainly wheat and potatoes in North Yorkshire. “If I didn’t control diseases, I wouldn’t have a crop.” Though it’s livestock epidemics such as BSE and foot and mouth that grab headlines, plant diseases quietly wipe out 10 per cent […]

CONSIDERED to be the voice of the god Apollo, the Oracle at Delphi foretold the fates of kings and nations. The rulers of Greece, Persia and the Roman Empire made the arduous journey to the Temple of Apollo, situated above the Gulf of Corinth, in order to seek divine guidance on everything from wars and […]

Four thousand years ago, the well dressed Egyptian mummy went to the tomb
decked out in all manner of jewels-not for decoration but as insurance. If
you wanted a full and happy afterlife, then you needed a whole and well
preserved body and

It’s after midnight. The shadowy prison is prepared. Specimen jars line the kitchen bench like cells in a corridor, waiting quietly for the inmates to arrive. The mood is sombre. I wonder: “Will the capture be successful?” I am tentative, nervous and armed. Clumsy hands guarded by gardening gloves carry tweezers almost half my body […]